CHAPTER TWO
“Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief—”
His telephone started to yammer as soon as he was home. “Nuts to you,” said Hamilton. “I’m going to get some sleep.” The first three words were the code cut-off to which he had set the instrument; it stopped mournfully in the middle of its demand.
Hamilton swallowed eight hundred units of thiamin as a precautionary measure, set his bed for an ample five hours of sleep, threw his clothes in the general direction of the service valet, and settled down on the sheet. The water rose gently under the skin of the mattress until he floated, dry and warm and snug. The lullaby softened as his breathing became regular. When his respiration and heart action gave positive proof of deep sleep, the music faded out unobtrusively, shut off without so much as a click.
“It’s like this,” Monroe-Alpha was telling him, “we’re faced with a surplusage of genes. Next quarter every citizen gets ninety-six chromosomes—”
“But I don’t like it,” Hamilton protested.
Monroe-Alpha grinned gleefully. “You have to like it,” he proclaimed. “Figures don’t lie. Everything comes out even. I’ll show you.” He stepped to his master accumulator and started it. The music swelled up, got louder. “See?” he said. “That proves it.” The music got louder.
And louder.
Hamilton became aware that the water had drained out of his bed, and that he lay with nothing between him and the spongy bottom but the sheet and the waterproof skin. He reached up and toned down the reveille, whereupon the insistent voice of his telephone cut through to him. “Better look at me, Boss. I got troubles. Better look at me, Boss. I got troubles. Better look at me, Boss. I got troubles—”
“So have I. Thirty minutes!” The instrument shut off obediently. He punched for breakfast and stepped into the shower, eyed the dial, and decided against the luxury of a long workout. Besides, he wanted breakfast. Four minutes would do.
Warm soapy emulsion sprayed over his body, was scrubbed in by air blast, was replaced at the end of the first minute by water of the same temperature in needle jets. The temperature dropped, the needle jets persisted for a few seconds, then changed to a gentle full stream which left him cool and tingling. The combination was his own; he did not care what the physiotherapists thought of it.
The air blast dried him with a full minute to spare for massage. He rolled and stretched against the insistent yielding pressure of a thousand mechanical fingers and decided that it was worthwhile to get up, after all. The pseudo-dactyls retreated from him. He pushed his face for a moment into the capillotomer. Shave completed, the booth sprayed him with scent and dusted him off. He was beginning to feel himself again.
He tucked away a quarter-litre of sweet lemon juice and went to work seriously on the coffee before turning on the news roundup.
The news contained nothing fit to be recorded permanently. No news, he thought, makes a happy country but a dull breakfast. The machine called out the plugs for a dozen stories while the accompanying flash pictures zipped past without Hamilton’s disturbing the setting. When he did so, it was not because the story was important, but because it concerned him. The announcer proclaimed, “Diana’s Playground Opened to the Public!”; the flash panned from a crescent moon down to the brutal mountain surface and below to a gaily lighted artificial dream of paradise. Hamilton slapped the tell-me-more.
“Leyburg, Luna. Diana’s Playground, long touted by its promoters as the greatest amusement enterprise ever undertaken off Earth or on, was invaded by the first shipload of tourists at exactly twelve thirty-two, Earth Prime. These old eyes have seen many a pleasure city, but I was surprised! Biographers relate that Ley himself was fond of the gay spots—I’m going to keep one eye on his tomb while I’m here; he might show up—” Hamilton gave half an ear to the discourse, half an eye to the accompanying stories, most of his attention to half a kilo of steak, rare.
“—bewilderingly beautiful, weirdly sensuous low-gravity dancing.
“The gaming rooms are thronged; the management may have to open annexes. Particularly popular are the machines offered by Lady Luck, Incorporated—Hamilton’s Hazards they are called by the trade. In fact—” The picture that went with the spiel did not show a throng in Hamilton’s estimation; he could almost feel the trouble the pick-up man had gone to in order to shoot favorable angles.
“—roundtrip excursion tickets which entitle the holder to visit every place of amusement in the Playground, with three days’ hotel accommodations, strictly high-gravity, every room centrifuged.”
He switched it off and turned to the telephone. “Connection—one one one zero.”
“Special service,” a husky contralto answered him presently.
“Gimme the Moon, please.”
“Certainly. To whom do you wish to speak, Mr.—uh, Hamilton?”
“Hamilton is correct. I would like to talk to Blumenthal Peter. Try the manager’s office at Diana’s Playground.”
There was a delay of several seconds before an image appeared on the screen. “Blumenthal speaking. That you, Felix? The image at this end is lousy. All streaked up with incidentals.”
“Yeah, it’s me. I called to ask about the play, Pete . . . what’s the matter? Can’t you hear me?”
The face of the image remained quiet for a long three seconds, then said suddenly, “Of course I can hear you. Don’t forget the lag.”
Hamilton looked sheepish. He had forgotten the lag—he always did. He found it difficult to remember, when staring right into a man’s live features, that there would be a second and a half delay before that man—if on the Moon—could hear, another second and a half for his voice to travel back, three seconds lag in all. Three seconds lag seems inconsiderable but it is long enough to stride six paces, or fall forty-one metres.
He was glad there was no phone service to the minor planets; it would be maddening to wait ten minutes or so between sentences—easier to stat a letter. “Sorry,” he said. “My mistake. How was the play? The crowds didn’t look so good.”
“Naturally the crowd was light. One shipload isn’t Noah’s Ark. But the play was okay. They had plenty of scrip and were anxious to spend. We reported to your agent.”
“Sure. I’ll get the report, but I wanted to know what gadgets were popular.”
“Lost Comet went strong. And so did Eclipses.”
“How about Claiming Race and Who’s Your Baby?”
“Okay, but not too heavy. Astronomy is the angle for this dive. I told you that.”
“Yes, I should have listened to you. Well, I’ll figure out a revamp. You could change Claiming Race right now. Call it High Trajectory and rename the mobiles after some of the asteroids. Get it?”
“Right. We’ll redecorate it in midnight blue and silver.”
“That’s right. I’ll send a stat to confirm. That’s all, I guess. I’m clearing.”
“Wait a minute. I took a whirl at Lost Comet myself, Felix. That’s a great game.”
“How much did you drop?”
Blumenthal looked suspicious. “Why, about eight hundred and fifty, if you must know. Why do you assume I lost? Isn’t the game level?”
“Certainly it’s level. But I designed that game myself, Pete. Don’t forget that. It’s strictly for suckers. You stay away from it.”
“But look—I’ve figured out a way to beat it. I thought you ought to know.”
“That’s what you think. I know. There is no way to beat the game.”
“Well—okay.”
“Okay. Long life!”
“And kids.”
As soon as the circuit was clear the phone resumed its ubiquitous demand. “Thirty minutes. Better look at me, Boss. I got troubles. Better—”
He removed a stat from the receiver; it shut up. “To Citizen Hamilton Felix 65-305-243 B47,” it read, “Greetings. The District Moderator for Genetics presents his compliments and requests that Citizen Hamilton visit him at his office at ten hundred tomorrow.” It was dated the previous evening and had an added notation requesting him to notify the moderator’s office if it were not convenient to keep the appointment, refer to number such-and-so.
It lacked thirty minutes of ten hundred. He decided to comply with the request.
The Moderator’s suite struck Hamilton as being rather less mechanized than most places of business, or perhaps more subtly so. It was staffed with humans where one expects auto-gadgets—the receptionist, for example. The staff was mostly female, some grave, some merry, but all were beautiful, very much alive, and obviously intelligent.
“The Moderator will see you now.”
Hamilton stood up, chucked his cigaret into the nearest oubliette, and looked at her. “Do I disarm?”
“Not unless you wish. Come with me, please.”
She ushered him as far as the door to the Moderator’s private office, dilated it, and left him as he stepped through. “Good morning, sir!” a pleasant voice called out.
Hamilton found himself staring at the Moderator. “Good morning to you,” he answered mechanically, then, “For the love o’—!” His right hand slid of its own volition toward his sidearm, hesitated, changed its mind, and stopped.
The Moderator was the gentleman whose dinner party had been disturbed by the incident of the wayward crab leg.
Hamilton recovered some of his poise. “Sir,” he said stiffly, “this is not proper procedure. If you were not satisfied, you should have sent your next friend to wait on me.”
The Moderator stared at him, then laughed in a fashion that would have been rude in another man—but from him it was simply Jovian. “Believe me, sir, this is as much of a surprise to me as it is to you. I had no idea that the gentleman who exchanged courtesies with me yesterday evening was the one I wished to see this morning. As for the little contretemps in the restaurant—frankly, I would not have made an issue of the matter, unless you had forced me to the limit. I have not drawn my tickler in public for many years. But I am forgetting my manners—sit down, sir. Make yourself comfortable. Will you smoke? May I pour you a drink?”
Hamilton settled himself. “If the Moderator pleases.”
“My name is Mordan”—which Hamilton knew—“my friends call me Claude. And I would speak with you in friendship.”
“You are most gentle—Claude.”
“Not at all, Felix. Perhaps I have an ulterior motive. But tell me: what was that devil’s toy you used on the cocky young brave? It amazed me.”
Hamilton looked pleased and displayed his new weapon. Mordan looked it over. “Oh, yes,” he said, “a simple heat engine burning a nitrate fuel. I think I have seen its pattern, have I not, on display at the Institution?”
Felix acknowledged the fact, a little crestfallen that Mordan was so little surprised at his toy. But Mordan made up for it by discussing in detail with, apparently, lively interest the characteristics and mechanism of the machine. “If I were a fighting man, I would like to have one like it,” he concluded.
“I’ll have one fashioned for you.”
“No, no. You are kind, but I would have no use for it.”
Hamilton chewed his lip. “I say . . . you’ll pardon me . . . but isn’t it indiscreet for a man who does no fighting to appear in public armed?”
Mordan smiled. “You misconstrue. Watch.” He indicated the far wall. It was partly covered with a geometrical pattern, consisting of small circles, all the same size and set close together. Each circle had a small dot exactly in the center.
Mordan drew his weapon with easy swiftness, coming up, not down, on his target. His gun seemed simply to check itself at the top of its swing, before he returned it to his holster.
A light puff of smoke drifted up the face of the wall. There were three new circles, arranged in tangent trefoil. In the center of each was a small dot.
Hamilton said nothing. “Well?” inquired Mordan.
“I was thinking,” Hamilton answered slowly, “that it is well for me that I was polite to you yesterday evening.”
Mordan chuckled.
“Although we have never met,” Mordan said, “you and the gene pattern you carry have naturally been of interest to me.”
“I suppose so. I fall within the jurisdiction of your office.”
“You misunderstand me. I cannot possibly take a personal interest in every one of the myriad zygotes in this district. But it is my duty to conserve the best strains. I have been hoping for the past ten years that you would show up at the clinic, and ask for help in planning children.”
Hamilton’s face became completely expressionless. Mordan ignored it and went on. “Since you did not come in voluntarily for advice, I was forced to ask you to visit me. I want to ask you a question: Do you intend to have children any time soon?”
Hamilton stood up. “This subject is distasteful to me. May I have your leave, sir?”
Mordan came to him and placed a hand on his arm. “Please, Felix. No harm can be done by listening to me. Believe me, I do not wish to invade your private sphere—but I am no casual busybody. I am your moderator, representing the interests of all of your own kind. Yours among them.”
Hamilton sat down without relaxing. “I will listen.”
“Thank you. Felix, the responsibility of improving the race under the doctrines of our republic is not a simple one. We can advise but not coerce. The private life and free action of every individual must be scrupulously respected. We have no weapon but cool reason and the appeal to every man’s wish that the next generation be better than the last. Even with cooperation there is little enough we can do—in most cases, the elimination of one or two bad characteristics, the preservation of the good ones present. But your case is different.”
“How?”
“You know how. You represent the careful knitting together of favorable lines over four generations. Literally tens of thousands of gametes were examined and rejected before the thirty gametes were picked which constitute the linkage of your ancestral zygotes. It would be a shame to waste all that painstaking work.”
“Why pick on me? I am not the only result of that selection. There must be at least a hundred citizens descended from my great-gross-grandparents. You don’t want me—I’m a cull. I’m the plan that didn’t pan out. I’m a disappointment.”
“No,” Mordan said softly, “no, Felix, you are not a cull. You are the star line.”
“Huh?”
“I mean it. It is contrary to public policy to discuss these things, but rules were made to be broken. Step by step, back to the beginning of the experiment, your line has the highest general rating. You are the only zygote in the line which combines every one of the favorable mutations with which my predecessors started. Three other favorable mutations showed up after the original combinations; all of them are conserved in you.”
Hamilton smiled wryly. “That must make me still more of a disappointment to you. I haven’t done very much with the talents you attribute to me, have I?”
Mordan shook his head. “I have no criticism to make of your records.”
“But you don’t think much of it, do you? I’ve frittered away my time, done nothing more important than design silly games for idle people. Perhaps you geneticists are mistaken in what you call ‘favorable characteristics.’”
“Possibly. I think not.”
“What do you call a favorable characteristic?”
“A survival factor, considered in a broad sense. This inventiveness of yours, which you disparage, is a very strong survival factor. In you it lies almost latent, or applied to matters of no importance. You don’t need it, because you find yourself in a social matrix in which you do not need to exert yourself to stay alive. But that quality of inventiveness can be of crucial importance to your descendants. It can mean the difference between life and death.”
“But—”
“I mean it. Easy times for individuals are bad times for the race. Adversity is a strainer which refuses to pass the ill-equipped. But we have no adversity nowadays. To keep the race as strong as it is and to make it stronger requires careful planning. The genetic technician eliminates in the laboratory the strains which formerly were eliminated by simple natural selection.”
“But how do you know that the things you select for are survival factors? I’ve had my doubts about a lot of them.”
“Ah! There’s the rub. You know the history of the First Genetic War.”
“I know the usual things about it, I suppose.”
“It won’t do any harm to recapitulate. The problem those early planners were up against is typical—”
The problems of the earliest experiments are typical of all planned genetics. Natural selection automatically preserves survival values in a race simply by killing off those strains poor in survival characteristics. But natural selection is slow, a statistical process. A weak strain may persist—for a time—under favorable conditions. A desirable mutation may be lost—for a time—because of exceptionally unfavorable conditions. Or it may be lost through the blind wastefulness of the reproductive method. Each individual animal represents exactly half of the characteristics potential in his parents.
The half which is thrown away may be more desirable than the half which is perpetuated. Sheer chance.
Natural selection is slow—it took eight hundred thousand generations to produce a new genus of horse. But artificial selection is fast, if we have the wisdom to know what to select for.
But we do not have the wisdom. It would take a superman to plan a superman. The race acquired the techniques of artificial selection without knowing what to select.
Perhaps it was a bad break for mankind that the basic techniques for gene selection were developed immediately after the last of the neo-nationalistic wars. It would be interesting to speculate whether or not the institution of modern finance structure after the downfall of the Madagascar System would have been sufficient to maintain peace if no genetic experiments had been undertaken. But pacifist reaction was at its highest point at this time; the technique of para-ectogenesis was seized on as a God-given opportunity to get rid of war by stamping it out of the human spirit.
After the Atomic War of 1970, the survivors instituted drastic genetic regulations intended for one purpose alone—to conserve the Parmalee-Hitchcock recessive of the ninth chromosome and to eliminate the dominant which usually masks it—to breed sheep rather than wolves.
It is wryly amusing that most of the “wolves” of the period—the Parmalee-Hitchcock island is recessive; there are few natural “sheep”—were caught by the hysteria and cooperated in the attempt to eliminate themselves. But some refused. The Northwest Colony eventually resulted.
That the Northwest Union should eventually fight the rest of the world was a biological necessity. The outcome was equally a necessity and the details are unimportant. The “wolves” ate the “sheep.”
Not physically in the sense of complete extermination, but, genetically speaking, we are descended from “wolves,” not “sheep.”
“They tried to breed the fighting spirit out of men,” Mordan went on, “without any conception of its biological usefulness. The rationalization involved the concept of Original Sin. Violence was ‘bad’; nonviolence was ‘good.’”
“But why,” protested Hamilton, “do you assume that combativeness is a survival characteristic? Sure—I’ve got it; you’ve got it; we’ve all got it. But bravery is no use against nuclear weapons. What real use is it?”
Mordan smiled. “The fighters survived. That is the final test. Natural selection goes on always, regardless of conscious selection.”
“Wait a minute,” demanded Hamilton. “That doesn’t check. According to that, we should have lost the Second Genetic War. Their ‘mules’ were certainly willing to fight.”
“Yes, yes,” Mordan agreed, “but I did not say that combativeness was the only survival characteristic. If it were, the Pekingese dog would rule the earth. The fighting instinct should be dominated by cool self-interest. Why didn’t you shoot it out with me last night?”
“Because there was nothing worth fighting about.”
“Exactly. The geneticists of the Great Khan made essentially the same mistake that was made three hundred years earlier; they thought they could monkey with the balance of human characteristics resulting from a billion years of natural selection and produce a race of supermen. They had a formula for it—efficient specialization. But they neglected the most obvious of human characteristics.
“Man is an unspecialized animal. His body, except for its enormous brain case, is primitive. He can’t dig; he can’t run very fast; he can’t fly. But he can eat anything and he can stay alive where a goat would starve, a lizard would fry, a bird freeze. Instead of special adaptions he has general adaptability—”
The Empire of the Great Khans was a reversion to an obsolete form—totalitarianism. Only under absolutism could the genetic experiments which bred homo proteus have been performed, for they required a total indifference to the welfare of individuals.
Gene selection was simply an adjunct to the practices of the imperial geneticists. They made use also of artificial mutation, by radiation and through gene-selective dyes, and they practiced endocrine therapy and surgery on the immature zygote. They tailored human beings—if you could call them that—as casually as we construct buildings. At their height, just before the Second Genetic War, they bred over three thousand types including the hyperbrains (thirteen sorts), the almost brainless matrons, the clever and repulsively beautiful pseudo-feminine freemartins, and the neuter “mules.”
We tend to identify the term mule with fighters, since we knew them best, but in fact, there was a type of mule for every sort of routine job in the Empire. The fighters were simply those specialized for fighting.
And what fighters! They needed no sleep. They had three times the strength of ordinary men. There is no way to compare their endurance since they simply kept on going, like well-designed machines, until disabled. Each one carried fuel—“fuel” seems more appropriate than “food”—to last it for a couple of weeks, and could function beyond that time for at least another week.
Nor were they stupid. In their specialization their minds were keen. Even their officers were mules, and their grasp of strategy and tactics and the use of scientific weapons was masterly. Their only weakness lay in military psychology; they did not understand their opponents—but men did not understand them; it worked both ways.
The basic nature of their motivation has been termed a “substitute for sex sublimation,” but the tag does not explain it, nor did we ever understand it. It is best described negatively by saying that captured mules became insane and suicided in not over ten days’ time, even though fed on captured rations. Before insanity set in they would ask for something called vepratoga in their tongue, but our semanticists could discover no process referent for the term.
They needed some spark that their masters could give them, and which we could not. Without it they died.
The mules fought us—yet the true men won. Won because they fought and continued to fight, as individuals and guerilla groups. The Empire had one vulnerable point, its coordinators, the Khan, his satraps and administrators. Biologically the Empire was a single organism and could be killed at the top, like a hive with a single queen bee. At the end, a few score assassinations accomplished a collapse which could not be achieved in battle.
No need to dwell on the terror that followed the collapse. Let it suffice that no representative of homo proteus is believed to be alive today. He joined the great dinosaurs and the saber-toothed cats.
He lacked adaptability.
“The Genetic Wars were brutal lessons,” Mordan added, “but they taught us not to tamper casually with human characteristics. If a characteristic is not already present in the germ plasm of the race we don’t attempt to put it in. When natural mutations show up, we leave them on trial for a long time before we attempt to spread them around through the race. Most mutations are either worthless, or definitely harmful, in the long run. We eliminate obvious disadvantages, conserve obvious advantages; that is about all. I note that the backs of your hands are rather hairy, whereas mine are smooth. Does that suggest anything to you?”
“No.”
“Nor to me. There appears to be no advantage, one way or the other, to the wide variations in hair patterns of the human race. Therefore we leave them alone. On the other hand—have you ever had a toothache?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not. But do you know why?” He waited, indicating that the question was not rhetorical.
“Well . . . it’s a matter of selection. My ancestors had sound teeth.”
“Not all of your ancestors. Theoretically it would have been enough for one of your ancestors to have naturally sound teeth, provided his dominant characteristics were conserved in each generation. But each gamete of that ancestor contains only half of his chromosomes; if he inherited his sound teeth from just one of his ancestors, the dominant will be present in only half of his gametes.
“We selected—our predecessors, I mean—for sound teeth. Today, it would be hard to find a citizen who does not have that dominant from both his parents. We no longer have to select for sound teeth. It’s the same with color blindness, with cancer, with hemophilia, with a great many other heritable defects—we selected and eliminated them, without disturbing in any way the ordinary, normal, biologically commendable tendency for human beings to fall in love with other human beings and produce children. We simply enabled each couple to have the best children of which they were potentially capable by combining their gametes through selection instead of blind chance.”
“You didn’t do that in my case,” Hamilton said bitterly. “I’m a breeding experiment.”
“That’s true. But yours is a special case, Felix. Yours is a star line. Every one of your last thirty ancestors entered voluntarily into the creation of your line, not because Cupid had been out with his bow and arrow, but because they had a vision of a race better than they were. Every cell in your body contains in its chromosomes the blueprint of a stronger, sounder, more adaptable, more resistant race. I’m asking you not to waste it.”
Hamilton squirmed uncomfortably. “What do you expect me to do? Play Adam to a whole new race?”
“Not at all. I want you to perpetuate your line.”
Hamilton leaned forward. “Gotcha!” he said. “You’re trying to do what the Great Khans did. You’re trying to separate out one line and make it different from the rest . . . as different as we are from the control naturals. It’s no good. I won’t have it.”
Mordan shook his head slowly. “Wrong on both counts. We intend to follow a process similar to that used to get sound teeth. Have you ever heard of Deaf Smith County?”
“No.”
“Deaf Smith County, Texas, was a political subdivision of the old United States. Its natives had sound teeth, not by inheritance, but because of the soil. It gave them a diet rich in phosphates and fluorides. You can hardly appreciate the curse of dental caries in those days. Teeth actually rotted in the head, and were the cause of a large part of the continual sicknesses of the time. There were nearly a hundred thousand technicians in North America alone who did nothing but remove and repair diseased teeth—even at that, four-fifths of the population had no such help. They simply suffered and died, with their rotten teeth poisoning their whole bodies.”
“What has this to do with me?”
“It will have. The data from Deaf Smith County was seized on by the contemporary technicians—medicine men, they called them—as a solution for the problem. Duplicate the diet of the Deaf Smithians—no more caries. They were perfectly right and biologically quite wrong, for an advantage is no good to a race unless it can be inherited. The clue was there, but they used it the wrong way. What we looked for finally were men and women who had perfect teeth despite poor diet and lack of attention. In time it was proved that all such cases had a group of three genes, previously uncharted. Call it a favorable mutation. Or call the susceptibility to tooth decay an unfavorable mutation which didn’t quite kill off the race.
“My predecessors conserved this particular gene group. You know how inheritance fans out; go back enough generations and all of us are descended from the whole population. But, genetically, our teeth are descended from one small group—because we selected to preserve that dominant. What we want to do with you, Felix, is to conserve the favorable variations present in you until the whole race has your advantages. You won’t be the only ancestor of coming generations—oh, no!—but you will be, genetically, the ancestor of them all in the respects in which you are superior to the majority.”
“You’ve picked the wrong man. I’m a failure.”
“Don’t tell me that, Felix. I know your chart. I know you better than you know yourself. You are a survivor type. I could set you down on an island peopled by howling savages and dangerous animals—in two weeks you would own the place.”
Hamilton grudged a smile. “Maybe so. I’d like to try it.”
“We don’t need to try it. I know! You’ve got the physique and the mentality and the temperament. What’s your sleep ration?”
“Around four hours.”
“Fatigue index?”
“It runs around a hundred and twenty-five hours, maybe more.”
“Reflex?”
Hamilton shrugged. Mordan suddenly whipped his sidearm clear, aimed it at Hamilton. Hamilton had his own out and had Mordan covered at appreciably the same instant. He returned it at once. Mordan laughed and replaced his own. “I was in no danger,” he declared. “I knew that you could draw, evaluate the situation, and decide not to fire, before a slower man would see that anything was going on.”
“You took a long chance,” Hamilton complained.
“Not at all. I know your chart. I counted not only on your motor reactions, but your intelligence. Felix, your intelligence rating entitles you to the term genius even in these days.”
There followed a long silence. Mordan broke it. “Well?”
“You’ve said all you have to say?”
“For the moment.”
“Very well, then, I’ll speak my piece. You haven’t said anything that convinces me. I wasn’t aware that you planners took such an interest in my germ plasm, but you didn’t tell me anything else that I did not already know. My answer is ‘No’—”
“But—”
“My turn—Claude. I’ll tell you why. Conceding that I am a superior survival type—I don’t argue that; it’s true. I’m smart and I’m able and I know it. Even so, I know of no reason why the human race should survive . . . other than the fact that their make-up insures that they will. But there’s no sense to the whole bloody show. There’s no point to being alive at all. I’m damned if I’ll contribute to continuing the comedy.”
He paused. Mordan waited, then said slowly, “Don’t you enjoy life, Felix?”
“I certainly do,” Hamilton answered emphatically. “I’ve got a twisted sense of humor, and everything amuses me.”
“Then isn’t life worth living for itself alone?”
“It is for me. I intend to live as long as I can and I expect to enjoy most of it. But do most people enjoy life? I doubt it. As near as I can tell from outward appearances it’s about fourteen to one against it.”
“Outward appearances may be deceiving. I am inclined to think that most people are happy.”
“Prove it.”
Mordan smiled. “You’ve got me. We can measure most things about the make-up of a man, but we’ve never been able to measure that. However—don’t you expect your own descendants to inherit your zest for living?”
“Is it inheritable?” Hamilton asked suspiciously.
“Well, truthfully, we don’t know. I can’t point to a particular spot on a particular chromosome and say, ‘There lies happiness.’ It’s more subtle than blue eyes versus brown eyes. But I want to delve into this more deeply. Felix, when did you begin to suspect that life was not worth living?”
Hamilton stood up and paced nervously, feeling in himself such agitation as he had not felt since adolescence. He knew the answer to that question. He knew it well. But did he wish to bare it to this stranger?
No one speaks to a little child of chromosome charts. There was nothing to mark Hamilton Felix out from other infants in the first development center he could remember. He was a nobody, kindly and intelligently treated, but of importance to no one but himself. It had dawned on him slowly that his abilities were superior. A bright child is dominated in its early years by other, duller children, simply because they are older, larger, better informed. And there are always those remote omniscient creatures, the grown-ups.
He was ten—or was it eleven?—when he began to realize that in competition he usually excelled. After that he tried to excel, to be conspicuously superior, cock-o’-the-walk. He began to feel the strongest of social motivations, the desire to be appreciated. He knew now what he wanted to be when he “grew up.”
The other fellows talked about what they wanted to do. (“I’m going to be a rocket pilot when I grow up.” “So am I.” “I’m not. My father says a business man can hire all the rocket pilots he wants.” “He couldn’t hire me.” “He could so.”)
Let them talk. Young Felix knew what he wanted to do. He would be an encyclopedic synthesist. All the really great men were synthesists. The whole world was their oyster. Who stood a chance of being elected to the Board of Policy but a synthesist? What specialist was there who did not, in the long run, take his orders from a synthesist? They were the leaders, the men who knew everything, the philosopher-kings of whom the ancients had dreamed.
He kept his dream to himself. He appeared to be pulling out of his pre-adolescent narcissist period and to be undergoing the social integration of adolescence with no marked trouble. His developers were unaware that he was headed for an insuperable obstacle. Youths seldom plan to generalize their talents; it takes more subtle imagination than they usually possess to see romance in being a policy former.
Hamilton looked at Mordan. The man’s face invited confidence. “You’re a synthesist, aren’t you? You aren’t a geneticist.”
“Naturally. I couldn’t specialize in the actual techniques. That takes a lifetime.”
“The best geneticist on your staff can’t hope to sit where you are sitting.”
“Of course not. They wouldn’t wish to.”
“Could I become your successor? Go ahead—answer me. You know my chart.”
“No, you couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“You know why. You have an excellent memory, more than adequate for any other purpose, but it’s not an eidetic memory. A synthesist must have complete memory in order to be able to cover the ground he must cover.”
“And without it,” Hamilton added, “a man can never be recognized as a synthesist. He just isn’t one, any more than a man can claim to be an engineer who can’t solve fourth degree equations in his head. I wanted to be a synthesist and I wasn’t equipped for it. When it was finally pounded into my head that I couldn’t take first prize, I wasn’t interested in second prize.”
“Your son could be a synthesist.”
Hamilton shook his head. “It doesn’t matter anymore. I still have the encyclopedic viewpoint, but I wouldn’t want to trade places with you. You asked me when and how it was that I first came to the conclusion that life doesn’t mean anything. I’ve told you how I first began to have my doubts, but the point is: I still have ’em.”
“Wait,” Mordan put in. “You still have not heard the whole story. It was planned that eidetic memory would be incorporated in your line either in your generation, or in your father’s. Your children will have it, if you cooperate. There is still something lacking which needs to be added and will be added. I said you were a survival type. You are—except for one thing. You don’t want children. From a biological standpoint that is as contra-survival as a compulsion to suicide. You got that tendency from your dexter-great-grandfather. The tendency had to be accepted at the time as he was dead before his germ plasm was used and we hadn’t much supply in the bank to choose from. But it will be corrected at this linkage. Your children will be anxious to have children—I can assure you of that.”
“What’s that to me?” Hamilton demanded. “Oh, I don’t doubt that you can do it. You can wind ’em up and make ’em run. You can probably eliminate my misgivings and produce a line that will go on happily breeding for the next ten million years. That still doesn’t make it make sense. Survival! What for? Until you can give me some convincing explanation why the human race should go on at all, my answer is ‘no.’” He stood up.
“Leaving?” asked Mordan.
“If you will excuse me.”
“Aren’t you interested in knowing something about the woman we believe is suitable for your line?”
“Not particularly.”
“I choose to interpret that as permission,” Mordan answered affably. “Look over there.” He touched a control on his desk; Hamilton looked where he had been directed to. A section of the wall faded away and gave place to a stereo scene. It was as if they were looking out through an open window. Before them lay a garden swimming pool, its surface freshly agitated . . . by diving, apparently, for a head broke the surface of the water. The swimmer took three easy strokes toward the pick-up, and climbed out on the bank with effortless graceful strength. She rolled to her knees, stood up bare and lovely. She stretched and laughed, apparently from sheer animal spirits, and glided out of the picture. “Well?” asked Mordan.
“She’s comely, but I’ve seen others.”
“It’s not necessary that you ever lay eyes on her,” the Moderator added hastily. “She’s your fifth cousin, by the way. The combination of your charts will be simple.” He snapped off the scene, replaced it with a static picture. “Your chart is on the right; hers is on the left.” Two additional diagrams then appeared, one under his, one under hers. “Those are the optimum haploid charts for your respective gametes. They combine so—” He touched another control; a fifth chart formed itself in the center of the square formed by the four others.
The charts were not pictures of chromosomes, but were made up of the shorthand used by genetic technicians to represent the extremely microscopic bits of living matter which are the arbiters of human make-up. Each chromosome was represented by a pattern which more nearly resembled a spectogram than any other familiar structure. But the language was a language of experts; to a layman the charts were meaningless.
Even Mordan could not read the charts unassisted. He depended on his technicians to explain them to him when necessary. Thereafter his unfailing memory enabled him to recall the significance of the details.
One thing alone was evident to the uninstructed eye: the two upper charts, Hamilton’s and the girl’s, contained twice as many chromosome patterns—forty-eight to be exact—as the charts of the gametes underneath them. But the chart of the proposed offspring contained forty-eight representations of chromosomes—twenty-four from each of its parents.
Hamilton ran his eye over the charts with interest, an interest he carefully repressed. “Intriguing, I’m sure,” he said indifferently. “Of course I don’t understand it.”
“I’d be glad to explain it to you.”
“Don’t bother. It’s hardly worthwhile, is it?”
“I suppose not.” Mordan cleared the controls; the pictures snapped off. “I must ask you to excuse me, Felix. Perhaps we can talk another day.”
“Certainly, if you wish.” He glanced at his host in surprise, but Mordan was as friendly and as smilingly urbane as ever. Hamilton found himself in the outer office a few moments later. They had exchanged goodbyes with all the appropriate intimate formality of name-friends; nevertheless Hamilton felt a vague dissatisfaction, a feeling of incompleteness, as if the interview had terminated before it was over. To be sure, he had said no, but he had not said it in all the detail he had wished to.
Mordan went back to his desk and switched the charts on again. He studied them, recalling all that he had been taught about them and dwelling with interest on the middle one.
A chime played the phrase announcing his chief technical assistant. “Come in, Martha,” he invited without looking around.
“I’m in, Chief,” she replied almost at once.
“Ah—so you are,” he answered, turning to her.
“Got a cigaret?”
“Help yourself.” She did so from the jeweled container on his desk, inhaled it into life, and settled down comfortably . . . She was older than he, iron grey, and looked as competent as she was. Her somber laboratory coveralls were in marked contrast to the dignified dandyism of his costume, but they fitted her character.
“Hamilton 243 just left, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“When do we start?”
“Mmnm . . . How would the second Tuesday of next week do?”
She raised her brows. “As bad as that?”
“I’m afraid so. He said so. I kicked him out—gently—before he had time to rationalize himself into a position from which he would not care to back down later.”
“Why did he refuse? Is he in love?”
“No.”
“Then what’s the catch?” She got up, went to the screen and stared at Hamilton’s chart, as if she might detect the answer there.
“Mmmm . . . He posed me a question which I must answer correctly—else he will not cooperate.”
“Huh? What was the question?”
“I’ll ask you. Martha, what is the meaning of life?”
“What! Why, what a stupid question!”
“He did not ask it stupidly.”
“It’s a psychopathic question, unlimited, unanswerable, and, in all probability, sense-free.”
“I’m not so sure, Martha.”
“But—Well, I won’t attempt to argue with you outside my own field. But it seems to me that ‘meaning’ is a purely anthropomorphic conception. Life simply is. It exists.”
“He used the idea anthropomorphically. What does life mean to men, and why should he, Hamilton, assist in its continuance? Of course I couldn’t answer him. He had me. And he proposed to play Sphinx and not let us proceed until I solve his riddle.”
“Fiddlesticks!” She snapped the cigaret away savagely. “What does he think this clinic is—a place to play word games? A man should not be allowed to stand in the way of racial progress. He doesn’t own the life in his body. It belongs to all of us—to the race. He’s a fool.”
“You know he’s not, Martha.” He pointed to the chart.
“No,” she admitted, “he’s not a fool. Nevertheless, he should be required to cooperate. It’s not as if it would hurt him or inconvenience him in any way.”
“Tut, tut, Martha. There’s a little matter of constitutional law.”
“I know. I know. I abide by it, but I don’t have to worship it. Granted, it’s a wise law, but this is a special case.”
“They are all special cases.”
She did not answer him but turned back to the charts. “My oh my,” she said half to herself, “what a chart! What a beautiful chart, Chief.”